


Deja Vu

by WhyNotFly



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Bi Agnes Montague, Canon Adjacent AU, Descriptions of burns and being burned, F/F, F/M, Kissing, Souldbonds, ambiguous ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:13:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28263720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyNotFly/pseuds/WhyNotFly
Summary: “How can I remember things I never knew?”  Jon asks, three steps behind and falling farther.  When Agnes leans across his desk to snag his cigarettes, the desk light catches in her eyes and they glow, like a deer on a black stretch of highway.“Maybe we never learn anything new.”  Agnes shakes a cigarette into her palm and balances it neatly between her lips.  “Maybe we’re always just remembering things we knew before.”
Relationships: Agnes Montague/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Past Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	Deja Vu

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RavenXavier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RavenXavier/gifts).



> For the lovely and beautiful Elodie. I hope that my tormenting you about what this fic is has made up for all the LIES you told me about my hanukkah present. And I hope this lives up to all your expectations. Have a very merry Christmas, and next year may you spend it with me <3
> 
> AHH I posted this so fast I forgot to thank EvanescentJasmine and AbbyLeaf101 for the beta. Love you guys!!

When Jon inherited his office, the smell still lingered in the air. Like a full pack of cigarettes ground into the wood grain of his brand new desk. Like ash, trapped in the walls.

 _Was she a smoker?_ He’d asked Elias, halfway between the welcome wagon speech of this being his ‘new home’ and a reminder of the forms he had to file with employee affairs.

_Gertrude? Oh no. She had other ropes to hang herself from._

Jon’s grandmother had always said that anyone who takes up smoking must have a death wish. Respectfully, Jon had waited until after the funeral before properly indulging the habit.

_The Institute does tend to attract applicants with somewhat self-destructive tendencies._

_I suppose I’m in good company, then,_ Jon had answered, and Elias had laughed as if there was something worth his laughter and closed his hand around Jon’s wrist in something that could have been a handshake, but wasn’t. There had been excitement in the tremble of his fingers. It matched the black spots that swam in front of Jon’s eyes. The room smelled like sandalwood and vanilla and smoke.

 _Just remember, no ignition sources in the archives,_ Elias had said, closing the door to Jon’s new office behind him. And after he left, it just smelled like smoke.

***

Jon’s desk has a strange coloration. He doesn’t get to see it often because of the sprawl of paper covering every conceivable surface. (Each paper a person, each paper a testament to a life torn to shreds, each person a kindling, each life a wick—

Jon’s desk has a strange coloration. Sometimes he shuffles his work into a drawer and traces the edge of the black staining. A large semi-circle blooming out from the far edge of his desk, and two nearly perfect circles above that. Like a sunrise. Or a frown. 

He’d tried to scratch it off once and come away with soot beneath his nails.

Looking at it makes him feel empty, like looking at a picture with the eyes torn out. (He must have read that metaphor somewhere. It must be a statement, winding into his subconscious. He hasn’t been sleeping well, lately. He wakes up in the middle of the night with his head pillowed on his desk and his shirt stuck to his back with sweat. He’s been having nightmares of dying and his body never being found.)

Jon keeps the black stain on his desk covered up. He is trapped in the close walls of his office that smell like ash and choking dust. He needs to clear his head. When he pushes open the door and escapes into the courtyard, he chokes down one sharp breath of frozen air before his fingers are scrabbling for his cigarettes, and he greedily swallows the smoke.

***

The first time he meets her, she doesn’t introduce herself. Where a normal statement giver would provide their name, she simply stares and lets the crackling buzz of the tape fade into the ambient hum of the archives around them. Jon doesn’t hear it anymore, the way he doesn’t hear his own heartbeat until something startles it into the spotlight.

In the dim of the basement, her hair is brown. And her eyes are black. 

“You’re sweating,” she says, and Jon lifts a hand to his neck as if she might be lying. But she doesn’t look like a liar.

“Oh?” She says. “Then what do I look like?”

“A murderer,” Jon answers.

“Do you think I’m going to murder you?”

“No.” The answer exists almost before the question does, spitting the certainty out like old dust in his mouth. 

The woman steps forward and leans into his desk, settling into it like a cherished memory. Like opening a photo album that has sat on the shelf for decades. Her hips fit neatly into the center of the dark patch on the edge of his desk, and each of her hands come down naturally into the centers of the two dark circles.

They are burns, Jon suddenly knows. And she is burning them.

“How?” He asks, because there is something growing inside him that craves questions even when it holds all the answers like fireflies trapped in a jar. Slowly dying. He feels it fluttering in him, the need, expanding each time Elias rests a hand on his shoulder and says _go home go home go home._

_Rest._

“I like to think it’s the little bit of Gertie inside me,” she says, indulgently, as if she is willing to exist in this moment purely for him. “A touch of the hellfire down where she’s burning.”

Jon tries to swallow, but there is no moisture left in his throat. “Are you religious, then?”

“Hard not to be, these days,” says the woman whose name, Jon remembers, is Agnes.

“About time,” Agnes scoffs. She slips one long fingered hand across the desk and tugs at the lapel of Jon’s jacket, revealing the slim white box of cigarettes tucked into his breast pocket. “Do you smoke now? I hope it’s my influence.”

“How can I remember things I never knew?” Jon asks, three steps behind and falling farther. When Agnes leans across his desk to snag his cigarettes, the desk light catches in her eyes and they glow, like a deer on a black stretch of highway.

“Maybe we never learn anything new.” Agnes shakes a cigarette into her palm and balances it neatly between her lips. “Maybe we’re always just remembering things we knew before.”

“Put me in the _ground_ if the world is truly such pretentious hogwash,” Jon mutters and Agnes laughs. She covers the sound with her hand and when she lifts it away, the tip of the cigarette is glowing red.

“No ignition sources in the archives.” Jon draws his eyebrows together and frowns at her.

Agnes lifts the cigarette from her mouth and blows a slow waft of smoke across the room. It tastes like Jon’s own breath. “Is this the part where you try to stop me?”

Jon stands from his chair and walks around his desk towards her. With each step, he can feel the heat growing on his skin, rippling and drying out the soft flesh of his eyes. He wants to blink, but he doesn’t. They stare at each other the way she has stared at him a thousand times as he plucks the cigarette from her lips and replaces it with his mouth. 

The kiss lasts only a moment.

“Dangerous habits,” Agnes says, just a little bit breathless in their proximity.

Jon chuckles. “I’ve been told I have that sort of inclination.”

“So was that all to save your papers?” Agnes asks as Jon steps back and grinds the cigarette out against the burnt patch of his desk.

“I _am_ the Head Archivist.”

“You’re the Archivist,” Agnes echoes.

Jon twists suddenly to the side and lifts his elbow to his face as he begins to cough, his lungs forcing the smoke back up and stinging at his empty throat. When he looks back, Agnes is gone, and the brass knob of his office door is dented inwards, as if it had just barely begun to melt. 

In the lapel of Jon’s jacket, there are two blackened spots in the shape of perfect fingerprints. 

***

Jon meets her again at the coffee shop just far enough off his commute to the Institute that he never sees anyone he knows.

The first thing she says is, _you shouldn’t kiss me._

The second thing she says is, _you smell like smoke._

“You’re one to talk.” Jon pulls out the chair across from her. She hadn’t left it purposefully empty, but still he knows it’s meant for him. “And I don’t exactly go around kissing people randomly in public.”

Agnes’s eyes flick up to meet his, and for a moment they catch the light through the windows and echo gold like stained glass, like amber. 

Jon flushes full scarlet and his gaze wanders away, rushing to preserve what little pride he still has. “Yes, well, you and I had a rather irregular first impression.”

“My first impression of you, Archivist,” Agnes says, closing her eyes and dipping a finger into the cup of black coffee in front of her, “was you trying to burn my apartment down with me inside.”

Jon stares down at the mug in front of Agnes as the liquid starts to bubble around her finger. He closes his eyes against a waft of hot steam as it brushes softly by his face.

“That seems like a poor tactic.”

The corners of Agnes’s mouth quirk up and Jon is hit by a sudden wave of sadness as he remembers just how rare her smiles are.

“Yes, well.” Agnes pulls her finger free and dabs it primly on a napkin. “She learned.”

Jon’s eyebrows furrow and he leans in closer. “Gertrude. My predecessor.”

Agnes rolls her eyes up and away, staring off at the cloudless blue sky framed by the fading white lattice of the window shutters. “In a sense.”

“In _several_ senses, it would seem.”

“What do you want to _know_ , Archivist?”

“Do you know who killed her?” Jon can’t stop the question from ripping its way out of him. He’s been tasting it for months, ever since Martin discovered her body down in the tunnels. It’s as though it has lived on the tip of his tongue, always threatening to spill out into the sunlight.

Agnes turns away from the windows and the light in her eyes goes dark. Brown and black and hooded, a closed book when all Jon desperately wants are straight answers. “You remind me so much of her, you know. Back in the beginning. When all she could do was chase after shadows. I forgot how innocent it all was.”

“And whatever that led to ended with her dead.” Jon lays a hand flat against the table, as close as he can get to her before he feels his fingernails peeling back from the heat. “Please, Agnes. Help me now. Help me escape it.”

Agnes smiles again, and this too, Jon remembers. He’s seen it all too often. Her pain. Her regret.

“There is no escaping it.”

“Agnes,” he says again, like her name could be a ledge to grip before slipping into the abyss. “Please. I don’t know why, but you’re the only one I can trust. I trust you. Everything around me is madness and betrayal and I _need_ to know what’s happening to me.”

Agnes reaches across the table towards his hand, hovering just above it, so close he can feel the hairs on the back of his palm shiver with the proximity. There is a longing in her movement, in her eyes when they meet his, as if they are separated by panes of glass instead of a hair's breadth away.

“Ask me a question I can answer, Jonathan Sims,” she whispers. “And I will answer.”

Jon swallows and she’s right. His breath does taste like smoke. The scars on his face itch where they have only just begun to heal.

“Why shouldn’t I kiss you?”

The hand over his pulls away as if it had been burned. Agnes pushes herself up from the table and turns around to grab the heavy coat slung over the back of her chair in spite of the mid-July heat. She refuses to meet Jon’s eye as she bustles past him, so he darts out a hand to grab the edge of her sleeve, feeling much like he did as a child daring to touch the hot stove, just for a moment. Just to see how it feels.

“You promised.”

She turns down towards him, her eyes filled with so much pain that Jon almost regrets asking. But the hungry thing inside him needs to know. It needs to pull at the strings of her heart until she unravels from the inside out so he can pick the secrets and eat them like berries. Agnes reaches down and cups his cheek and Jon sits and waits for the pain that doesn’t come. Like paper fire, all light and no heat. She leans down and kisses his hair like sunlight, gentle, warm.

“Because you don’t love me,” she whispers in his ear. “You just remember when you used to.”

***

Jon barely manages to stagger over to the park bench before he collapses in pain, curled over with his burnt and blistered hand pulled tightly into his chest. He breathes through it the way his grandmother taught him when he used to have panic attacks, the way Georgie would squeeze his thigh in rhythm. He doesn’t want to do this alone, but he can’t bring Georgie into this. Can’t tell… Can’t tell Martin, can’t--

“I told Jude not to touch you.”

“Well you didn’t do a very good job,” Jon snaps. Looking up at Agnes is something like staring into the sun. The crisp, clouded air dilutes the light and filters it down into the reflected fire of her eyes. She blinks, and Jon’s hand pulses in time, the agony shooting up his arm and making him clench his teeth.

“I could make you invulnerable.” Agnes folds her hands neatly behind her back. “All you’d have to do is have nothing left to lose.”

“Charming.” Jon braces his uninjured hand against the back of the bench and levers himself up to standing. Agnes steps gracefully back out of his way, long skirt rippling with the movement. She doesn’t try to help. They both know she cannot help with this. “Is that what Gertrude did? Sacrifice everything she cared about for you?”

“Not _for_ me,” Agnes answers, staring down at the tips of her boots.

“And yet she still died.” Jon turns harshly away, walking down the sidewalk and forcing Agnes to hurry after him. “Where were you then?”

“You don’t understand, Archivist.” Jon can hear Agnes’s clipped footsteps just behind him, but he doesn’t turn around to face her. “That’s not how any of this works.”

“Well perhaps if you’d told me how it worked when I asked, I’d still have two working hands.” The thing inside of Jon is hungry, like his chest is a mouth gaping open, desperate to be filled. It wants answers. It wants Agnes.

“I don’t help people.” Agnes grabs the back of Jon’s jacket and pulls him to a stop. The air on his blistered flesh is excruciating, he can feel it beating in time with his heart. “I can only hurt.”

Jon stands silently, for a moment, feeling Agnes roll the fabric of his jacket around in her hand. He can smell the acrid smog of burning fabric and he needs a cigarette the way he needs to feel Agnes on his skin, but accomplishing either without permanently ruining his right hand seems impossible. What would Georgie think, if he never came back? Would she search the prisons? Would she be safe?

Jon turns around slowly, feeling the heat of his smouldering jacket seep down to his skin as her grip slides free. Agnes is looking at him the way she looked at him the night before he died. Down in those tunnels, entombed by his own tapes. Smelling her like gasoline in the back of his throat.

“If you do nothing but hurt me,” Jon asks. “Why do I want you?”

“It’s just nostalgia.” Agnes’s gaze wanders away, almost guilty. “It’ll pass.”

“Well, what if I don’t want it to pass?” Jon reaches out and cups her face with his burnt and cracking hand. Everywhere they touch, Jon’s skin begins to burn again, his flayed palm opening back up, his blisters seeping into the soft hair of her cheek. But the heat does not reach her smile.

“I could never be so cruel as to make you fall in love with me twice.” 

Agnes lifts herself onto her tiptoes like a little girl to press a kiss to Jon’s cheek. The touch is soft and gentle, and it feels like a goodbye against his skin. He’d been crying only a moment ago, when Jude took his hand. That must be why he’s not crying now. It feels like a piece of something integral to him is being levered out of his skin and taken. Like a segment of his spine torn out. When she pulls back to face him, he is smaller than he used to be. He is missing something.

“But I thought you were my fate,” he says, trying not to sound desperate. “I thought you were my answer.”

“I was Gertrude’s fate,” Agnes says. “Not yours.”

“But aren’t I Gertrude?”

“No.” Agnes squeezes Jon’s burnt hand once and the pain sparks through him like fireworks. “You’re Jonathan Sims. You can make your own choices. Better choices.”

Jon’s laugh is as painful as the burn on his hand, like a crawling thing trying to escape the tears stuck in his throat. “I already have a tendency to make rather self-destructive choices.” 

Agnes smiles, one of those rare ones Jon remembers oh so faintly. A fleeting impression of lips pressed into skin. Of fire, of closed eyes and trust that should never have been given. Agnes steps back and sticks her hands into the pockets of her heavy wool coat, and the air around them is warm, like a summer’s day.

“Smoke a cigarette,” she says. “It’ll kill you slower.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm on tumblr [@apatheticbutterflies](https://apatheticbutterflies.tumblr.com/) if you'd like to chat with me, I'm very friendly.


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